Recently, I spent a few days experimenting with a Twitter automation service, TweetLater. If you’ve ever followed someone on Twitter and then immediately had them follow you back or gotten a message that said something like “Thanks for following me, check out my web site at ….”, chances are you’ve been on the receiving end of an automated tweet. (Although, people can and do send these sorts of messages manually.)
Some people are truly offended by these sorts of automated tweets, and some will even unfollow you if you use them. I have received them, and continue to receive them sometimes when I follow new people, and they don’t bother me. My goal with TweetLater was to see what impact it would have on the people following me and whether it would drive more traffic to this blog. Here’s what I found, after using it over a period of three days.
Effect on followers
Using TweetLater, I sent automatic welcome messages to almost 50 new followers over the course of about three days. Three people expressed some sort of discernible unhappiness with those messages, as far as I could tell. Usually that took the form of a reply, a direct message back to me or a tweet expressing their dislike with automatic welcome messages. One or two people unfollowed me. To their credit, when I engaged a couple of these people, they were willing to have a conversation about their decisions. I didn’t try to change any minds, I just wanted to know what was motivating them. Did they dislike the fact that it was an automatic tweet, without human involvement, and thus impersonal? Did they dislike the fact that my welcome message asked them to visit my blog? In general, they disliked both. This small group of people viewed automated tweets as a form of spam.
So there was some negative feedback, though it involved a relatively small percentage of the people who got automated messages from me.
Effect on traffic to blog
Did the automated tweets drive new traffic to my blog? Well, yes, but not as much as I would have expected. And it had no discernible affect on the number of subscribers to MarkTzk.com. According to my Google Analytics numbers, I got just four visits from Twitter during the period of my little experiment. That’s one-third the level of traffic I got from organic search via Google over those three days (yes, I know, my traffic numbers are very small; I am not an A-lister). There were a few direct visits during that time, some of which may be attributable to Twitter, as people may have seen my tweet on their mobile device or through a desktop Twitter app and come via that route, and Google may not have recorded the precise source of traffic. But even counting those visits, most of my automated direct messages did not seem to generate new visits to my site.
Arguably, in the “negative reaction vs. increased traffic” trade-off, I got more new traffic from this practice. But it was a very small margin, and I tend to think it’s probably not worth even the very limited negative reaction automated tweets can create. I should also note that several people responded to my automated tweets with positive thank you messages, and a few opened up short dialogues with me that were, very positive. So not everybody views automated tweets as spam.
My takeaways
I do think services like TweetLater can be useful, but I think you’ve got to be pretty clear first why you’re on Twitter and what your goals are with your Twitter account. If you mean your tweets to represent you as a person and you want to build meaningful relationships, then automated tweets are probably not a good choice. If, on the other hand, you just want to automate your Twitter activity or drive traffic to a site, then this may be a good thing to do. If you choose that, though, you’ll have to accept that some people will respond very negatively, and often publicly, to your practice. (I’ll have another post about etiquette on Twitter and other social media sites in the future.)
To be really effective in driving traffic to your blog, I think you would have to spend some time experimenting with what exactly your auto-welcome message says and optimizing that. You would also have to optimize whatever landing page you send new followers to.
Some people send auto-welcome messages that don’t contain links. These thank people for following and may have a friendly message such as “I look forward to getting a chance to network with you. Please let me know if I can help you in any way.” Though that’s less pushy than sending a link, I’m not sure it really accomplishes much if there’s no human being behind it to start a dialogue.
The bottom line: If you use an automated Twitter service of some kind, be very clear about your goals with it and be prepared for at least some negative reaction.
(p.s. If you’re interested, I’m @marktzk on Twitter.)
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In no particular order, I'm a writer, MBA, ex-journalist, blogger, geek, strategic communications pro, father, struggling novelist 
{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
Mark,
Thanks for sharing this article about the automated service! I started searching for information regarding some type of automated tweeting service just minutes ago and noticed your article in google.
What stimulated my search for automated tweets, which was actually my google “automated tweets” I noticed a top ten or so Twitter user kept sending tweets consistently minutes apart and began to become suspicious he was using some type of automated tweeting system.
Now, personally, I would not object to this type of practice because he tweets interesting links leading ultimately to his online blog or journal. Anyway, I thought it would be a good opportunity to do the same, but doing it smart and less offensive.
I said all of that to ask a question, Mark. What would be the outcome if you let the recipients know that the welcome messages were automated?
What you let the recipients know this message is automated and welcoming the new followers and without any links? Would that be less offensive to the few that would be normally offended?
And would it be cool to send different tweets with useful interesting links during different time periods with limited repeat tweets or no repeating tweets, all different?
Just a thought, I think there is lots of room to make it work better. And I always believe there are better solutions to problems, it just requires some patient experimentation similar to using the scientific method.
I truly think as you stated previously, automated systems must be used cautiously. Like you said, you have to consider what is your intended outcome. Promoting or building individual relationships or maybe both in a mild or indirect way or something perhaps.
Your article stimulated some intelligent thoughts. I am imagining how musicians and singers are able to communicate with the masses of people and build such a strong following and yet they do not have personal relationships with all of there fans.
There fans still feel connected with the artist and or musicians, right? Music verse text, I understand is different, but they both communicate, right? Just a thought. Good article, Mark!
Interesting post, Mark. I think when trying to gauge the number of people who were put off by your automated tweet, you should consider that only a small percentage of those people are likely to have contacted you about it. I would guess that only 20% or so would actually take some action (send a message or un-follow) to let you know they were dissatisfied with your automatic tweet. So if you count your three (3) replies expressing dissatisfaction and the two (2) people who un-followed you, and divide it by .2, you get twenty five (25) people – or 50% of the people who received it – who were actually put off by the automatic reply.
I know – it just a guess. But I came across your blog post researching this idea…trying to decide whether to use automatic messaging on one of my Twitter accounts…and I have now officially decided against it.
So, thanks for your post!
Thanks for the post Mark. I do use TweetLater and have had maybe one complaint about the automated DM response (out of about 1300 followers).
I also will usually set up a tweet to repeat 2/6 times over a course of time to catch new followers who may not have been around for the first. I’m still experimenting with that but have found it working out. I’ll notice that a tweet directing someone to a blog article on its’ last tweet will still be retweeted by someone else.
The technology is new to everyone & I think that we all learn over time how it works for us.
PS: My automated DM basically just says thanks and asks them to tell me about themselves – rather than trying to sell or direct to a site. I get a lot of great responses.
I know this is an older post, but I wanted to comment. I am mentioning your post in my blog; I am really curious about the effectiveness of bot comments like those coming from TweetLater. I know that there are apps set up to specifically block any tweets coming from TweetLater, so that may have had something to do with the small percentage of dissatisfied comments.
But the bot practice is so ubiquitous. Does it work for anyone, or is it a case of everyone pretending that the emperor is wearing clothes?
This is an interesting post. I was just looking into trying Tweetlater, but wanted to learn more about it. I am still unsure though after reading this, I think I was more just trying to understand it a bit better, because I recently starting realizing that some people I follow use auto tweets.
Thanks for sharing this, it was just the kind of thing I was looking for.
Very interesting post. It’s cool how detailed you are at tracking your traffic. I’m trying to get better at that.
Here’s a question…there is a service that is called Ping.FM (you probably know) that allows you to ping all of your other profiles from 1 dashboard. Part of what is great about Tweetlater (socialoomph now) is that you can schedule Tweets to go out. But that only hits Twitter (and other apps like FB that allow you to tie them in with Twitter).
Do you know of a service that is like Ping (allowing to do multiple status updates at once) but that you can schedule in advance like Tweetlater?
Thanks for the help.
See you in the stairwell,
Rory Vaden
Here’s a fairly simple solution: Get an account at Hootsuite, which allows you to schedule Tweets later. You can hook up your Hootsuite account to your Ping.fm account (here are the details). That way, when Hootsuite sends a Tweet, whether its live or scheduled, it will go to all of the networks that your Ping.fm account is hooked to.
You have a cool blog, by the way. I’ve subscribed.
Awesome. Thanks for the advice Mark. Thank you also for the compliment of subscribing to my blog. I’m all connected up with you know too!
It’s a bummer that we didn’t meet a few months ago as I just moved from NC. We did one of our big public seminars there in Charlotte and Raleigh.
Keep cranking out the great stuff.
See you in the stairwell,
Rory
Thanks for this great post.
I’ve learned that all of the concerns can be avoided. You can make the Auto Tweet behave according to your needs. You can control it to the absolute. And the guys give you instant $ 10 for just signing up.
Very interesting post. It’s cool how detailed you are at tracking your traffic. I’m trying to get better at that.
What is the service people are using to blast tweets? For example, I have a couple of searches set up on Hootsuite. Once on a while I will see the same exact tweet from all different sources, one after the other. thanks
Like someone driving multiple Twitter accounts? If that’s the case, it’s pretty easy to do that with Hootsuite or CoTweet, among others. Lots of apps out there allow you to manage multiple accounts, schedule tweets ahead of time and send tweets through multiple accounts simultaneously.
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